The Song Remains Insane DVD
Max Cavalera is undoubtedly one of the most influential and important figures in metal today. Former band Sepultura leapt into the mainstream from the unlikely territories of deepest Brazil with their unrivalled, venomous cocktail of thrash ferocity and snarling punk attitude; while current venture Soulfly have spent the better part of a decade knocking down walls and musical boundaries of their own with a sonic battering ram of tribal influenced mayhem and delicate, flamenco driven serenity. The bands” debut DVD release is a detailed, all access journey with Max and co. captured live throughout the world over the course of the past several years. Featuring over an hour of live performance, previously unseen footage from inside the studio during the “Prophecy” recording sessions, up-close and personal band interviews and the four-piece’s entire video discography – ‘the Song Remains Insane” is an intriguing insight into an even more intriguing group of musicians, and irrefutably packs enough wallop to keep even the most avid followers satisfied for many an evening to come.
Ummm… Well, perhaps the afterlife isn’t all that bad after all..? No. Seriously, Zero keep true to their course and blast out another hammerfest of gaps, rails, gaps to rails, rails to gaps- As long as it’s big and scary it makes the cut. So, what’s new? Well, apart from the obvious fact that Jamie Thomas and his team of stuntmen are keen to promote the ‘grabbing of the board’ by serving up at least one per part, you might also notice the resistance to quick editing. Phew! I was worried I might have another epileptic seizure if the editing hadn’t changed… A quick run-down of performances will let you know that JT styles it up with some nice moves like 360 no-complies and polejams. I think his body has finally let him know that Stairway rails are a sure way to Heaven (Ha! What a pun!). Jon Allie hasn’t changed much; lots of flipping mixed with his rail assaults. However, I did admire the clean style Jon had considering the god-awful hand-dragging-I’ll-make-this-if-it-kills-me roll aways we’ve witnessed recently. Garrett Hill is nothing special- just a clone. Tony Cervantes gets his grab quota up to par and sticks out as someone to keep an eye open for. John Rattray saves the day with a bit of style and even gets Stu Graham to feature in his part. Somehow John just doesn’t look like he’s having fun on those rails. I don’t know… Tommy Sandoval will die trying and James Brockman has a couple of heavy hammers in there. Backside lipslides on suspended rails anyone? No, I didn’t think so…
They say a critic can make or break a career… Well, here goes! When I first saw the first ever DVS skate video, ‘Skate More’, I told anyone within earshot that the video was good. It made me want to skate and the team had done well to hold back for a couple of years before releasing the final product. Daewon Song had a SCANDALOUS part in my view, and Chico Brenes was probably going to get his appreciation from the older crowd, not the ‘ever-hungry-for-blood’ youth. I still stand by these opinions, but those first remarks were stated post premiere party and after a long wait for something new to come. It’s true that even if videos get released at a near cardiac rate, the quality is far slower to appear…
So, it’s 11pm Thursday night and James Sherry, Alan Christensen and I are speeding on the M1 heading North to Donnington with the i-POD on shuffle providing us with a magnitude of good tunes such as the new Finch and Hundred Strong albums, We Are Scientists, Interpol, Ween, Circle Jerks, Quasimoto and many more… but we were also hoping that some serious rock would spring up as the thought of watching Black Sabbath on Saturday night made us salivate during the entire journey.
Last year, Snickers really went for it and constructed this monster bowl inside the Download Festival and although the event and the skating was electric, the area that it stood in and the set up itself was always going to have to be changed, so what did they do? Well, for starters they dug a monstrous pit that could have housed a demon and then dumped a kinked vert bowl in the middle of it that had its own stage! There was a riot brewing and it was fuelled firstly by legendary skaters such as Mike McGill, Steve Olson, Duane Peters, Kevin Staab and Tony Alva. Caballero did not make the trip due to an accident which was a bummer but with these guys and the entire World Cup Skate crew, it was all set for some serious sessions.
The practice runs were amazing to watch in this bowl. Andy Scott was like a fish out of water and Jeurgon Horrworth’s and Renton Millar’s style is something that you just cannot NOT talk about. These riders have something most skaters’ dream of. But when you are stuck in one area inside this mammoth festival it’s easy to forget that once you are able to switch off the decks, stop DJ’ing and get amongst the metal mania, there is an entire world out there full of people who want to rock with their cocks out all night long until they puke, until they are seriously hurt, and until their ears bleed! Shame that our old bar mate Bill could not come up with the goods live. White Wedding was a blast and we danced like crazy but then new songs and a version of Jump by Van Halen was too much for someone who wants Slayer and Motorhead, so Napalm Death were next in line and that is where we bumped into Powley, Munson, Potter, and G-Money who were holding drinking comps from a 2litre bottle of diet Pepsi filled to the brim with a £6.40 a bottle of cheap as fuck Horsemen Whisky…it is here that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse was born!
Now, for those of you who like to party, you may well have come across Aftershock. This vile looking stuff is potent and is almost an instant party once it gushes down the back of your throat. The tent they sponsored had all sorts of drinking games such as a rodeo lamb, motorised porcelain toilets, sumo wrestling and a crap DJ that we would have burnt off the stage within 2 songs given the chance but this place was electric anyhow. The shots flowed and Powley started getting on one! He was next found at midnight on stage at the comedy tent after booing the paid fella off the stage and taking over the proceedings that the crowd was totally down for! 
The Saturday morning was the biggest hangover you could have dreamt of and there is nothing like trying to cue up a record whilst live bands are sound checking their drums and guitars whilst you are trying to hold back the puke! There were a lot of hangovers here, but somehow people were shredding this bowl like it was a mini ramp. The longest grind comp saw a 28ft 5-0 from the ever impressive Brian Patch through a corner of the bowl to scoop $5000 followed by Omar Hassan’s huge maydays. 
Hey James, what was going on outside of the Snickers Bowl? Well, aside from all of the drunken chaos, lunatic skateboarding and general bedlam, there are some awesome bands playing over the course of the weekend from the hottest new rockers to a handful of absolute legends of rock. Saturday morning I left Zac to DJ and headed to the main stage to check out punk nutters The Dwarves. First time I saw this band the gig ended after five minutes when the frontman Blag was punched into the drum kit and the whole gig ended in a hail of flying instruments. These days their gigs last longer, in fact today they refused to get off stage and just kept pounding out the hits until they cut the power. They’ve got ex-Queens Of The Stoneage beardy bassist Nick Oliveri back in the band and they showed the metal kids exactly how punk should be played. 
As the sun came down and the opening slow doom chords of ‘Black Sabbath’ rained over the crowd there was a real moment. 
Well, how do I explain the carnage that reigned after this gig? We left Dave Duncan and the lovely Jen, and headed for the Aftershock tent with 20 UK peeps, who were all blagged in through the back door to avoid queuing, and 10 aftershocks later, The Horsemen were ready to fully Riot! My shirt was ripped off my back as Powley hung from the tent poles! The DJ was abused so much to play classics, he was forced to find a Slayer record and we started the biggest mosh pit going!
But it all came to a sudden end when I managed to find a Jacuzzi in the tent full of semi naked people and went stumbling over to check it out in disbelief! I was hovering gently over some ply wood that covered the other half of this bubble fest and was about to fall just as a security guard dragged me in time before I plunged into the dirtiest, festival filled dirty water that would have taken me out! I was of course ejected and all I can remember on the way out was Powley in his piss soaked jeans crying, “will someone please kick me in the bollocks!” 
Sunday was obviously a bigger mess! We are all pickled to the bone by now with 6 hours sleep across 3 days! Put it this way, if the lights in the bowl had blown, the comp would have been saved by the shining red colour from Sean Goff’s eyes! How he skated on Sunday was beyond explanation! The best trick comp was won by Jeurgon’s fakie 720, the same best trick as 2004 mastered by PLG. Omar came second with a massive fs double heelflip fs air over the elbow, Andy Scott threw in fs tailslide shuv in and a bs tailslide shuv in, in the same run but came 3rd with an Alley oop kickflip board varial. 
So, to cap this off, you will not find a better skate and rock related festival this year in the UK as this was The Daddy of them all without a doubt. No extreme bollocks, fruitbooters, or happy sac idiots, just plain gnar. If you missed it, then you will have to wait until next year. It will take us that long to recover! Well done to Snickers who provided massive VIP treatment all weekend and worked hard to get this to a superb level. I got home to find slapped man-hand marks all over my body! Thanks Munson you Essex munkey! 
It’s not often you meet people on the road that have their own thing going on and they encapsulate you, so it’s always a pleasure and never a chore.
So I did, and I ended up getting like 27th out of 31 people or something so I felt pretty good that I didn’t get like dead last but I ended up doing some ripples in the water with Sonia from the Warp Tour contest and I ended getting kicked out of the following Warp tour that I had qualified for because some unmentioned professional skateboarders were a bit bummed that I had skated in a pro contest and told them that I was a amateur and totally said that I was trying to be a professional athlete and go to amateur contests which weren’t true. I was just skateboarding but it ended up working out that later on the following year I went to a contest in Colorado called the Concrete Challenge. It was the first pro event that I entered and won and so I figured well if I could do that then I might as well start walking the line.
For some reason we decided it was a good idea to go to Tijuana the night before we left and I didn’t have anything packed and woke up an hour late feeling sick! Maybe it was the food, maybe it was the booze I don’t know maybe it was both! I don’t know but I was in the hurt locker literally throwing in the cars still puking being driven to the airport. I had no idea what I was bringing, no idea what was packed the only thing that I accomplished that day was to lay on the floor and take my board apart! (laughs) Other than that, thanks to you Zac and your hospitality and hook ups with Crossfire. Caught in the Crossfire! (Woo Hoo!)
If you haven’t heard about once Black Flag/Rollins Band front man Henry Rollins’ spoken word performances, then where the hell have you been? I luckily caught one of his shows at the Barbican a few years ago, a sold out audience sat through what essentially is one man venting his spleen about a myriad of topics for over three hours. My bum may have been telling me in it’s own magical way that it had been THAT long sitting still with a dose of pins and needles, but my mind felt like it had only been 30 minutes. The man’s natural charisma is impossible to resist, he is shouting at you, yet you don’t mind the spit and bile because ultimately what he says will make you laugh, and more so, it”ll make you think! Henry Rollins is an articulate man, but he wont talk down to you, he wont dumb things down either, instead he explains things simply, directly and most importantly, interestingly. He touches on Politics, his own social commentary, music, his eternal mission to find love, his life in California and many more enticing nuggets throughout his set, all with a warmth and humbleness that is refreshing in this era when EVERYONE has an opinion.
In the past several years, good old fashioned metal has seen somewhat of a dramatic resurgence. As the clones and lemmings of the tiresome nu-metal movement slowly but surely came to a grinding halt; a new wave of devastating musical vengeance was simmering away in the underground melting pot, almost at boiling point. Quicker than you could say “I like hot cocks!” that pot finally boiled over, and in turn spilled out into the mainstream with the same snarling aggression possessed by the bands of which its juices contained. From the realms of straight-edge hardcore courtesy of California’s own Throwdown and Bleeding Through, to the tip of the metallic iceberg with genre heavyweights Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall and Chimaira; “Eye for an Eye” is a fond and enjoyable look at just how alive and kicking the modern day metal scene really is.
Here are the rules: 4 Teams (Almost, Zero, Deluxe and Girl) of 4 Riders (plus 1 filmer, 1 photographer and 1 team manager) spend 2 weeks crossing the United States of America skating designated spots and doing designated tricks with a points program for each task. The teams will also be joined by a mystery guest (Lance Mountain, Darren Navarette, Jeff Grosso and Ben Schroeder) with whom they must partake in tasks also. The winner is the team that gathered the most points. Sounds simple enough, but that”s not until you see what they have to skate (rails in the rain?), or what they have to do (Double flip nosemanual?). This is the second edition of the sure-shot King of the Road contest, so all the crazy shenanigans are there plus the Phelper. Between little Shetler fully going for it with an older lady friend, to Jaime Thomas skating rails bare-foot, Koston landing a flawless heelflip late shove-it (???), and passing by Trujillo and pals on a three man skateboard, all the madness and more is there!
Boston’s own Celtic punk veterans Dropkick Murphys are what many would consider legends in their own time. Having spent countless years forging a worldwide reputation as one of the most entertaining live bands around, the Irish-American’s at last bring their non-stop party attitude to your very own front room in the form of “On The Road With Dropkick Murphys“. Boasting a host of special features ranging from extensive on-road activities throughout a summer-long trek on the Warped Tour, an entire 24 song set from the St. Patrick’s Day weekend in their native Boston home, not to mention an entire music video discography; “On The Road With Dropkick Murphys” is a thoroughly entertaining and uncensored peek at one of the leading bands in the modern day punk scene.
How time flies; it was nearly a decade ago that Goldfinger released their debut album. At the time, the Californian quartet were largely indistinguishable from the masses of other pop-punk bands that formed in the wake of Green Day and the Offspring’s success, but they endured thanks to singer/guitarist John Feldmann’s seemingly innate ability to meld catchy tunes with an amusingly dark, self-deprecating sense of humour. This live DVD was recorded at a sold-out Los Angeles show in July 2003; it’s clear from the start that the home-town crowd are as devoted as they come. Happily, the band are also on robust form, romping through their set with typical exuberance. Highlights include John’s foray into the crowd during “Open Your Eyes“, the mass sing-along for “Counting The Days“, and the sheer enthusiasm that greets live favourite “Superman“. The sound and video quality is excellent throughout, and the band are never short of amusing between-song banter. There’s also plenty of extra features, including a band commentary, information on PETA (of whom Goldfinger are staunch supporters) and animal rights, and additional clips of other live performances. The footage of drummer Darrin Pfeiffer’s “antics”, by the way, has to be seen to be believed! Not for the faint hearted…